Search Results: glaciers

We all need a bit of weird, turning chops orange or making ice-cream out of beetroot. So I aspire to be a paperclip - that touch of menace as I approach a putative community of sheets despite all their disparate hate and flimsy promise ... A golden paperclip because a psychologist once said I was gilt-ridden.

In the past two weeks I've met a man who crossed the Andes on foot, horse, bicycle, car and even rollerblades. I've trekked with a mountain guide to a rocky outcrop upon which he was due to marry his fiancé the following weekend, before abseiling down it with her. I've stood in a forest with a woman who came here in the hope of finding the perfect plot of land. Landscapes have a profound effect on the traveller, but it's their inhabitants who evoke for us the soul of a place far more effectively.

If a three-year-old likes bears, you are into bears for the foreseeable future. Bears have been around since before there were pencils, my young friend said, which is inarguably true, and not something I had ever considered before. When we talk about what is lost in a world in which wilderness is lost, we never talk about the loss of the life we imagine. When there are no bears in the world, then no children will dream of bears, and draw bears, and sleep with bears, and that will be a terrible shame.

As a kiwi I had grown up with earthquakes. I remember them large, small and intrusive. Awed by their power, I cherished the still that followed. This is what made Nepal’s second major earthquake so different for me. I will never forget the beginning of the 7.3-magnitude quake, but will never recall the end.

The difficulty is not his privately-held heterodox views on climate change, but that Australia's most senior Catholic clergyman vigorously advances a position that could be interpreted as a statement of the official stance of the Catholic Church in Australia.

Senator Steve Fielding attempted to debunk climate change theories using graphs based on Channel 9's Snicko. The debate petered out when Tony Abbott incautiously declared it was all 'crap'. Re-thinking, he amended
crap to tax — it was just a big tax.

Observing this unique means of fishing, I realised an alternative intelligence was
at work, born of the islanders'
relationship to the environment. Ironically, this island is one of a growing number facing inundation by rising waters due to climate change.

Last week the Prime Minister’s Task Group on Emissions Trading released its report. Given that even Malcom Turnbull has described climate change as “the great economic challenge of our times”, the Report’s 200-plus pages are decidedly thin on substance.

In the past six months, climate change has gone from an idea which may have some future relevance to something which is already happening around us. Each region of the world seems to have had its own epiphany over climate change.

President Bush and Prime Minister Howard have used scientific uncertainty as an excuse to avoid cutting greenhouse gas emissions. This transgresses the precautionary principle that requires nations to take precautions not to harm other nations.

Despite the bleak prognosis, An Inconvenient Truth is an optimistic film. Al Gore is no doomsday prophet, but an engaging orator who believes humans can change to meet the threat posed by global warming.